Validation of the self-compassion scale in a sample of Italian special needs teacher

Introduction Special needs teachers deliver crucial care to their students by showing a particular attitude toward them. However, they usually face stressful situations that negatively impact their capacity to support their students, often reporting higher levels of burnout compared to teachers from mainstream education. Self-compassion has been seen to function as a protective factor against teacher stress, enhancing their resilience and coping abilities. Methods The current study aimed to evaluate the factorial structure, reliability, and validity of the Self-compassion Scale (SCS) in a sample of Italian special needs teachers (R1). In addition, it was investigated whether the satisfactory internal reliability of the SCS is confirmed (R2). Finally, the validity of the SCS criterion was assessed, assuming that each of its subscales would be related to anxiety, measured with GAD-7, and with resilience, measured with the BRS (R3). A sample of 629 teachers was enrolled in this study and completed an online questionnaire. Results Overall, the confirmatory factor analysis showed good or acceptable indices of fit to the data supporting the use of SCS to measure self-compassion in Italian special needs teachers. Discussion The tool could be helpful for future research to start exploring the self-compassion dimension at school as a protective factor that may foster teachers’ and, consequently, students’ well-being.


Introduction
According to the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), teachers experience greater job-related stress than other professionals. This is because teachers are required to handle several demands and responsibilities that underlie the use of social and emotional skills, such as emotional support, availability and regulation to students, and effective classroom management of students' challenging behaviors (Jennings, 2015). This is particularly true for special needs teachers. Research has shown that special needs teachers are a more vulnerable group than teachers from mainstream education, usually facing stressful situations that negatively impact their capacity to support their students (e.g., Brackenreed and Barnett, 2006;Jones and Youngs, 2012;Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond, 2017). Students with disabilities, indeed, are more likely to have behavioral difficulties and school failure due to severe behavioral and emotion regulation problems (e.g., Cibralic et al., 2019;Girgis et al., 2021). Furthermore, teachers' negative emotions that result from students' problematic behaviors negatively affect their perceived self-efficacy and studies. The focus in most recent research related to self-compassion has been on its mediating role between adult attachment and wellbeing" (p. 8), so their results complement the findings in previous studies (e.g., Neff and Faso, 2015;Moreira et al., 2016), demonstrating also the moderating role of self-compassion. Self-esteem has been extensively measured with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965). This scale is one of the most extensively used instruments to assess the concept of global self-esteem (Raboteg-Saric and Sakic, 2014).
In particular, with regard to teachers, Chen (2022) found that selfcompassion promotes teachers' resilience, "reflecting seemingly a transformative journey from a place of self-judgment to self-kindness, psychological isolation to psychological connectedness, and emotional rumination to emotional mindfulness" (p. 1). Moreover, in a study on 35 preschool teachers in Northern California who had to deal with challenging students, Jennings (2015) found that self-compassiontogether with mindfulness-represents important contributors to their social and emotional competence. In addition to this, self-compassion resulted in a protective factor for teachers' stress to the extent that supports the development of teachers' social and emotional competence, including both intrapersonal (self-awareness and selfmanagement) and interpersonal dimensions (social awareness and relationship management). Although this might be the case also for special education teachers, who must daily face the challenging behaviors and emotional states of their students with disabilities, to date, no studies have taken into account the protective role of selfcompassion in enhancing special education teachers' wellbeing.

The role of self-compassion in education and special education settings
Caring is a key factor for successful education (Noddings, 2018). In educational contexts, indeed, it allows the creation of a solid relationship between the teacher and the student that is characterized by receptivity and responsiveness. A good relationship between a teacher and their students has positive effects on both students' learning processes and teachers' self-efficacy and wellbeing (Poulou et al., 2019;Sulla and Rollo, 2023). According to Gilbert (2000), careseeking behaviors activate the affiliative system, self-compassion, and compassion toward others. In addition to this, taking into account Fogel and colleagues' definition of care-nurturance, "the provision of guidance, protection, and care to foster developmental change" (Fogel et al., 1986;p. 70), having a compassionate mindset means being supportive, understanding, kind, and helpful to others (Beaumont et al., 2022). These features clearly characterize special education contexts: special needs teachers deliver crucial care to their students by showing a particular attitude toward them (De Stasio et al., 2019. Thus, according to these studies, a compassionate mindset and its related skills in terms of caring and self-care could represent a crucial factor in supporting intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions of social and emotional competencies (Jennings, 2015) that teachers can use as protective tools for enhancing their wellbeing, their relationship with students, and consequently, students' wellbeing and learning processes. Furthermore, considering that these caring and self-care skills resulted particularly salient in organizational contexts characterized by high levels of Frontiers in Psychology 03 frontiersin.org acute and chronic stress (Dodson and Heng, 2022), they could represent a protective factor for special needs teachers' burnout onset. Although self-care resulted essential in the special educational setting, it is understudied in educational research. The body of research on teachers' self-compassion is recent and showed that higher self-compassion is related to teachers' lower stress (Hwang et al., 2019) and higher teaching efficacy (e.g., Moè and Katz, 2020). However, it includes few studies (e.g., Jennings, 2015;Akpan and Saunders, 2017;Hwang et al., 2019;Moè and Katz, 2020) and none of them involving special education teachers.
The current study Neff (2003a) has defined self-compassion as a "healthy form of self-acceptance, which involves being touched by one's own suffering, along with the desire to alleviate it and treat oneself with understanding and kindness" (p. 224). Specifically, it comprises three dimensions, each consisting of two contrasting factors: (1) self-kindness vs. selfjudgment, which is the ability to be caring with oneself rather than self-critical; (2) common humanity vs. isolation, which represents the capacity to remind ourselves that suffering is natural for human beings; and (3) mindfulness vs. over-identification factor which concerns understanding and acceptance of our painful experiences without judging ourselves (Neff, 2003a;Neff et al., 2005). According to the Author these three elements are associated with and foster one another. For example, a mindful understanding of failures could reduce self-judgment; or considering them as a natural part of human beings could help to prevent judging ourselves (Barnard and Curry, 2011).
Within this theoretical framework, Neff has developed the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS; Neff, 2003a), a 26-item questionnaire composed of six dimensions: Self-Kindness, Self-Judgment, Common Humanity, Isolation, Mindfulness, and Over-Identification. In validating the scale, indeed, Neff (2003a) found that a six-factor model fitted the data better than a three-factor model for each component (self-kindness vs. self-judgment; common humanity vs. isolation; mindfulness vs. over-identification).
Several studies have demonstrated its good internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and construct validity (Barnard and Curry, 2011), including the one of Petrocchi et al. (2014) conducted in the Italian context. The scale has been resulted valid and reliable in measuring self-compassion in the general population. However, it has never been validated on teachers' samples.
Having a reliable instrument to measure special needs teachers' self-compassion could help researchers and clinicians obtain data that could guide interventions aimed at fostering teachers' self-compassion as a protective factor for their stress levels and caring skills toward students. In addition to this, it could help to obtain data aimed at understanding its protective role on special needs teachers' stress levels, which could usefully help organizational leaders working in educational settings (e.g., school headmasters, university rectors) to clearly understand what self-compassion is, and how it can promote work engagement, job performance, and wellbeing at work.
Using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the main aim of this study was to assess the factorial structure of the SCS in a group of special needs teachers. In particular, our research questions were: (R1) Has the SCS's factorial structure of the Italian validation (six-factor structure; Petrocchi et al., 2014) good fit indexes also within a sample of special needs teachers?
(R2) Is the SCS internal reliability confirmed, with a Cronbach's alpha cut-off value not smaller than 0.70? (R3) Is the SCS criterion validity assessed, supposing that each of its subscales will correlate with anxiety, measured with the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale (GAD-7; Spitzer et al., 2006); and with Resilience, measured with the Brief Resilience Scale (Smith et al., 2008)?

Method Participants and procedure
Six hundred ninety-nine Italian special needs teachers were enrolled in this study between July and August 2022. While attending an in-person teacher training course at the University of Foggia, they completed a digitalized version of the self-report questionnaires included in this study. All participants signed informed consent, and they were secured about voluntary participation and anonymity.
The teachers come from different Italian regions and considering that this study population was a convenience sample, it may not be taken as representative of the entire population of Italian special needs teachers. This study was accepted by the Ethics Committee of the University of Foggia, Italy, and conducted in line with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Measures
Participants completed the following questionnaires: The Self-Compassion Scale (SCS; Neff, 2003a,b;Petrocchi et al., 2014) assesses the extent to which people have compassionate beliefs about themselves when facing failures or challenges. Specifically, the questionnaire measured how people usually behave toward themselves in difficult times. The questionnaire is composed of 26 items rated on a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 = "almost never" to 5 = "almost always. " Moreover, it includes six subscales: self-kindness (5 items; e.g., I try to be loving toward myself when I'm feeling emotional pain), self-judgment (5 items; e.g., When times are really difficult, I tend to be tough on myself), common humanity (4 items; e.g., When things are going badly for me, I see the difficulties as part of life that everyone goes through), isolation (4 items; e.g., When I think about my inadequacies, it tends to make me feel more separate and cut off from the rest of the world), mindfulness (4 items; e.g., When something upsets me I try to keep my emotions in balance), and over-identified (4 items; e.g., When I'm feeling down I tend to obsess and fixate on everything that's wrong).
The Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 Scale (GAD-7; Spitzer et al., 2006) represents a screening tool for detecting GAD. It is a self-report questionnaire composed of 7 items, measuring people's anxiety symptoms during the previous 2 weeks. Items are measured on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from 0 "not at all, " to 4, "nearly every day. " Total scores vary from 0 to 21, and 5, 10, and 15 represent cut-off points for mild, moderate, and severe anxiety. In this study, Cronbach's alpha was α = 0.90.
Frontiers in Psychology 04 frontiersin.org The Brief Resilience Scale (Smith et al., 2008) is a 6-item self-report measured on a 5-points Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), assessing psychological resilience. Higher scores indicate higher degrees of resilience. In this study, Cronbach's alpha was α = 0.81.
In addition to this, according to the Italian validation of the scale (Petrocchi et al., 2014), and considering that the factorial structure of this scale is not undisputed in the literature, we also tested three alternative models. Together with the six-factor model, we assessed a model with a single higher-order self-compassion factor (Neff, 2003a), a one-factor model (Deniz et al., 2008) and a two-factor model (dividing positive and negative dimensions of self-compassion; Gilbert et al., 2011). Considering that they are non-nested models, we used three information criteria to choose the best fit: AIC, BIC, and Sample-Size Adjusted BIC. Lower values of these indices indicate a better model (Wang and Wang, 2012).
Finally, R3 was investigated, measuring the SCS construct validity through convergent and discriminant validity.

Results
After controlling for the statistical distribution of the data (kurtosis and skewness values and Mahalanobis distance), 70 multivariate outliers were identified and deleted. Finally, 629 teachers (85% female) aged from 22 to 60 (M = 39.00; SD = 8.00), composed our sample. Table 1 shows teachers' demographic characteristics in the final sample (N = 629): 68% have a university degree or postgraduate specialization, and 18% have a high school diploma. Participants worked in kindergartens (7.7%), primary schools (27.8%), middle schools (30.1%), and high schools (34.4%). Overall, the items show acceptable skewness and kurtosis values (Table 2). Table 3 reports the fit indices of the four tested models. The six-factor model showed the lowest AIC, BIC, and Sample-Size Adjust BIC, and, therefore, the best fit (Wang and Wang, 2012). Analyzing the factor loadings of this model, we found that item 1 had a factor loading value < of |0.3|, and we deleted it (Brown, 2015). In addition to this, to improve the fit of the model, we checked modification indices. According to Jöreskog and Sörbom (1993), we identified the largest modification index, we estimated it, and we maintained it in the model only if the modified parameter could be interpreted substantively according to our theoretical framework. At the end of the process, we determined that covariances between the errors of three couples of items could be included in the final model (item11 and item8 r = 0.417, p = 0.000; item10 and item15 r = 0.283, p = 0.000; item5 and item19 r = 0.279, p = 0.000).

Discussion
The main aim of the current study was to evaluate the factorial structure, reliability, and validity of the SCS (Neff, 2003a,b) in an Italian sample of special education teachers. Although there is an adaptation of the SCS in Italian samples, to the best of our knowledge, there are none with teachers' samples.
Overall, findings from CFAs showed that a six-factor model, as validated in the development and validation study by Neff (2003a) and in the Italian adaptation by Petrocchi et al. (2014), provided a good fit to the data (R1). The internal consistency of the six dimensions was high and comparable to those obtained in the two aforementioned studies (R2). All the correlations among the six subscales were in the expected direction. As in the Italian study validation, the Common Humanity subscale presented nonsignificant or weaker correlations with the negative SCS dimensions (Self-Judgment, Isolation, and Over-Identification), and with anxiety and resilience levels. The common humanity dimension estimates the feeling of affinity with others in terms of weakness and imperfections, and in our Italian sample of special needs teachers, it is poorly related to the absence of self-criticism and resilience. As explained in the Italian validation study (Petrocchi et al., 2014), it could be possible that the recognition of being limited and imperfect may lead people to judge themselves because "they should not be suffering so much" or "they should get over it. " The subscales also demonstrated good construct validity (R3). The correlations among the six factors and the other measured variables were in the hypothesized direction. Specifically, GAD scores were positively correlated with the negative factors of the SCS (Self-Judgment, Isolation, Over Identified Subscale) and negatively correlated with the positive ones (Self-Kindness, Mindfulness). Similarly, resilience scores resulted be negatively related to the negative subscales of the SCS, and positively to the positive factors. These results indicate that teachers with high scores in the negative subscales are self-critical and reported higher levels of generalized anxiety and lower levels of resilience.  On the contrary, Italian special needs teachers that reported higher levels of self-compassion also encountered lower levels of anxiety and higher levels of resilience. According to the literature, selfcompassion has been demonstrated to be a protective factor for the onset and maintenance of mental illnesses (Egan et al., 2021), and psychological resilience results related to lower levels of stress and self-compassion levels (Kemper et al., 2015;Kotera et al., 2021). Furthermore, people declaring higher levels of self-compassion were also more resilient when encountering challenging adversity and failures (Neff et al., 2007;Tiwari et al., 2020). Thus, we may hypothesize that self-compassion could also be a key factor in reducing teachers' negative stress and mental health consequences.

Conclusion
The current study supported the use of SCS to measure self-compassion in Italian special needs teachers. This scale could be useful for future research to start exploring the self-compassion dimension at school as a protective factor that could foster teachers' social and emotional competencies, their relationship with students, their wellbeing, and, consequently, students' wellbeing and learning processes. In addition to this, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies aimed at examining the role of teachers' self-compassion in reducing stress, burnout, and technostress or in enhancing wellbeing and work engagement should be conducted to observe how and if the role of self-compassion changes when tested together with other protective and risk factors (e.g., resilience, anxiety, support received from colleagues, selfefficacy). These data could usefully inform organizational leaders working in educational settings (e.g., school headmasters, university rectors) to clearly understand what self-compassion is, and how it can promote work engagement, job performance, and wellbeing at work. Furthermore, SCS could represent a useful instrument to inform clinical interventions aimed at fostering teachers' individual protective factors (e.g., self-compassion, mindfulness, resilience). Finally, empirical research in different countries might also be needed in order to examine the cross-cultural stability of the scale' s factorial structure and advance our understanding of the selfcompassion dimension in teachers' wellbeing.

Data availability statement
The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy reasons.

Ethics statement
The study was reviewed and approved by Ethics Committee of the University of Foggia. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.